momorantings

In my earlier post, I wrote how I have observed that consumers have become ultra late purchasers this past year, while hypothesizing that with the state of the economy, most light to moderate users were waiting on a review to make a purchasing decision. Following that post, I received a lot of comments and e-mails asking how one could counteract this trend. I noted to the concern of some that we were shortening our advertising campaigns because we were finding no correlation between the amount of advanced advertising spends and the amount of advanced sales. This is not to suggest this course of action is for everyone, but I do believe it is wise for us. I further believe that we should start looking more at pricing as a strategy to encourage early purchasing behavior. The traditional approach of discounting performances early in a run is one method of attack, but I would suggest looking at what happens after a show takes off. If consumers are waiting for a great review before purchasin...

That's nearly £20 per day! Or to put it another way, never assume that any single element of your marketing will be considered in isolation. Not even the last-minute, additional strap-line on your sales advertisement.

It's all about making every aspect of the product/service experience as good as they can be and thereby making the user feel great about their achievements/ownership. But job one is making every aspect of the product/service experience as straightforward as possible and thereby not making the user feel stupid.

A recent review of the scientific literature has controversially suggested that breastfeeding does not bestow the benefits that have been claimed for it in recent times. ..it is very hard to separate the benefits of the mother’s milk from the benefits of the kind of mother who chooses to breastfeed.....In other words, breastfeeding studies could simply be showing what it’s like to grow up in a family that makes an effort to be healthy and responsible, as opposed to anything positive in breast milk. I'm not qualified to question that view and the logic does seem valid, but by chance I recently heard Sarah Blaffer Hrdy mention (in an aside about infant abandonment) that primates who breastfeed experience increased prolactin and oxytocin levels which helps them bond with their offspring. The marketing lessons: replication isn't enough and the most significant impact of your product/service isn't always the obvious one.

In recent weeks, I've blogged less frequently than before because I felt it had all been said and that surely everybody knows this stuff. But tonight, I heard industry practitioners speaking of clients worried about losing control of their messaging, obsessed with identifying those mythical influencers and, best of all, of the opinion that "the internet was only for people who love us or hate us - when we should surely be focussing on the indifferent masses." Perhaps your competitors don't know half as much as you think they do. Perhaps that gives you a great opportunity to steal a march on them.

This full-page Siemens ad appeared in today's Times. Complete with those two boxes obscuring the image. Now I've nothing against VR codes. My friend used the first one in the UK, but did so via a full-size outdoor poster which was one big VR code. Here it's slotted in as an afterthought - one that won't reach many people, one that distracts from the rest of the copy and one that ruins the design. It's effectively asking the readers to do something (scan the code)before they can find out what it is Siemens want to tell them. That's like the url that leads to a webpage with an "Enter here" button. That's like the customer service number that leads to a labyrinthine telephone menu. That's like the headline offer that forgets to tell you about the small print. It's all bad marketing. If you've somehow earned the customer's scarce attention, then at least have the sense to tell them something. Directly.

To say that this has been an odd year would be a drastic understatement. A little less than a year ago towards the end of September, I remember working with the leadership and board of Arena Stage on an action plan to address the stock market crash and the, at that time, anticipated economic crisis. It seemed we had an incredibly daunting task ahead of us -- exactly how does one forecast and prepare for an economic crisis on the scale that none of us have ever experienced before? At the conclusion of our fiscal year, I am happy to report that Arena Stage had an exceptionally strong year, both artistically and financially. Our success has afforded me the time and opportunity to look back over the course of the year and analyze some of the patterns we saw to learn from them as we embark upon the next fiscal year. From an overall observation, I started to notice two things that struck me almost immediately after the market crash in September: late purchasing behaviors became common place,...

Manuel Castells bored me rigid tonight while discussing his new book about power relations and networked societies, but he did suggest that a nugget of information is five times more likely to register in one's brain if it conforms to one's existing beliefs. He suggested that this was why liberals listened to NPR and Republicans watched Fox News and that the media didn't actually lead opinions. I saw it as powerful confirmation of the idea that communications can only bolster what people already believe about specific products and services. If your product/service isn't credible, you can't convince people otherwise.

Projects that translate digital content into something physical (combining the ease of the former with the tangibility of the latter) are all the rage in the marketing world. They speak to some basic human needs for tactility and possession and are a reaction to the increasing virtuality of many people's lives. While I love the whole idea of this Nike project and its modernisation of the age-old tradition of chalking messages on the Tour de France road, I'm not sure it is physical enough. If yours is one of the 100,000 messages, what is the likelihood of your seeing it? The race is, after all, nearly 2000 miles and three weeks long. Obviously, a lot of these issues will have been addressed but, in the context of such a huge "tarmac "billboard", is it personal enough? Or is it simply physical?

Listening to Chris Anderson discuss his new book Free last week was an uneasy experience for me. Not because of my feelings about the limits of his argument, but because I realised I knew about ten to fifteen percent of the audience. While it was great to catch up with many of them afterwards, I was struck that my learning would be more differentiated and therefore valuable if I were in an audience of strangers. This was confirmed a few evenings later, when I sat in an audience of strangers at a design seminar where various designers spoke of their influences and inspirations pecha-kucha style. Admittedly, I was there because I knew three of the nine people on stage, but that was pretty much all I knew. No prizes for guessing which experience was the more inspirational, informative and intoxicating. Since you want to make your product/service stand out from the crowd, it really helps if you occassionally do so too. Looking at the world through different eyes is a great way to start.

Two recent snippets of information that came my way. Channel 4 Television commissioned some research into teenagers so as to better tailor its education programming. Urban Tribes revealed that 50% of them consider themselves to be "alternative" while only 25% admitted to being "mainstream". Jonathan Ive, Apple's creative director, reminded his audience this week that "we don't do focus groups". Knowing best is all about really knowing and not just receiving answers and assuming they represent knowledge.